gerry b.

<p>If you want to experiment with older flash units on newer cameras a Wein Safe-Sync is a good investment. It also gives you a PC socket if your camera has a hot shoe but lacks a socket (like a Rollei 35).</p>

<p>I had the same problem with a 55mm 3.5 AI lens, and two independent estimates for cleaning and relubricating the lens were in the vicinity of $120-160. The second estimate was from a local firm that usually has quite low prices for work, I questioned them about the cost, and they said that the complexity of the lens with its CRC made it a particularly labor-intensive CLA, which follows the above comments. So, I bought an AI'd earlier version of the lens for about half the cost of the needed CLA. These are among the best bargains in Nikon lenses, but the lubrication issue is a problem.</p>

<p>If you own a tripod that does not have a reversible head with a 1/4" screw, you can also get adapters at B&H and Adorama that allow use of the Leitz head and also add about 3/8" to the height of the ballhead+tripod. I use one on a travel tripod with the Leitz head.</p>

<p>Obviously a nice camera. But what I am really impressed by is the quality your lightbox digitization of slides!</p>

<p>True creativity and a willingness to stifle it so you can shoot all the cliches that the market requires until "your vision" catches on (if it ever does).</p>

<p>Hmm, on my monitor the blown highlights are grey, not white and they are not particularly light in tone. And there are a lot of colors that are not washed out, they are actually pretty intense, especially the greens. I've shot thousands of Provia slides, with bracketing and sometimes with some significant overexposure, and I've never seen a look quite like this before.</p>

<p>Or they were scanned with wrong media settings.</p>

<p>Is it just me, or do these positives look like they were processed improperly? I To me these do not look like overexposed slides at all, they look like someone souped them in the wrong developer.</p>

<p>I agree that it is atmospheric and realistic. And I like the Banksy shot, too.</p>

<p>Since you are getting some detailed advice about traveling and shooting in the Highlands, I will add some specific advice about Shetland, where I have spent much time. First, it is a wonderful place to visit, with fantastic places for photography and very friendly and hospitable people. However, I would not go there for photography with hitch-hiking as my primary means of getting around. It is not uncommon to experience rain storms with wind gusts of 40+ miles per hour there in midsummer, and it is normal and frequent from September into May. I have traveled by hitchhiking there, and walking into winds like that with a heavy pack gets old real fast. There are buses, but then you lose flexibility in your photography if you are going from bus stop to bus stop. And they are not frequent in the most rural areas where there are some of the most spectacular photography opportunities.<br /> <br />It costs about US $45-50 a day to rent a car there, and if you get a diesel, which you should, you can go a long way on a tank of fuel because the distances are not great by North American standards when going around the archipelago. Believe me, this is the way to travel around Shetland. If you are intimidated about driving a stick shift on the left side of the road, Shetland is a good place to learn because there is not heavy traffic outside of the main town Lerwick. You can stay in simple hostels that are called camping bods and save money in housing, but you will want a car. One thing that is great about Shetland versus the west coast of Scotland, and it is partly a by-product of the wind, is that there are very few midgies there. The west coast of Scotland and its islands are breathtakingly beautiful, but those insects can be a distraction, and can affect your shooting as well.</p>

<p>If you follow your plan to hitch-hike through the Scottish islands, I would not take an RB. It is not just the weight, it is how it handles. The camera pretty much has to be carried in a back-pack because of its weight and size, and that means every time you want to take a shot with it you will have to remove the pack, unload the camera, and most of the time, mount it on a tripod, etc. Then go through all of the composition, shutter cocking, film advancing, focusing steps and with some frequency changing backs or films. Yes, that will be a contemplative way to shoot, but it rains very often in the Hebrides, the West Highlands and in Shetland, and often on short time cycles. In some places cars do not go by very often, so you may well be committed to longer than desirable walks. All of these environmental factors make field photography in general more challenging there than in other environments, and there is an advantage to be able to pull out a camera and put it away fairly quickly.<br>

<br />I think the advice about taking a TLR like a Rolleiflex, a Rolleicord, or a Minolta Autocord is worth a close look, because they are all quite light and small compared with an RB. For purposes of taking landscapes, where parallax shifts in close-ups do not matter, you can put a mask on the focusing screen to mark 645 size. A long time ago when I was making 4X4 superslides with a Rolleicord, I had the amazingly dim original ground glass screen replaced by Bill Maxwell and he scribed 4X4 cropping lines on the new screen, and it worked great. I suspect the Hasselblad option would also work well, but you will be into more money for that compared with a basic TLR.</p>

<p>Yes, I bought my 300mm 4 AF non-S used without a lens cap, and I bought a Tamron cap, I believe new but I cannot remember where. I agree with RJ - it is very well-made and works great on the lens.</p>

<p>It wasn't clear to me from your original post whether you liked the original transparencies in terms of their color balance? If so, then yes, you need to find a better processing and scanning service. If you decide to go with learning how to scan yourself with a scanner like the Epson flatbeds, then I think you will find that scanning transparencies for producing files for printing is easier to get into than scanning negative film. There are tricks in the scanning process that eventually make negative scanning no big deal, but it takes some experimentation to learn them. In general, there is a whole set of principles that need to be learned to become adept at scanning, which is one reason to find a lab that you like, and have them do it. Since you are using such high quality equipment to create the image, it would be a waste to lose that quality in processing and "post-processing". Just some thoughts, your mileage may vary.</p>

<p>I also understand the attraction of film, and also carry a Barnack Leica much of the time when I travel, but the poster's proposed kit just sounds incredibly heavy.</p>

<p>I have owned a 300mm 4.5 EDIF, and I currently own both the non AFS 300mm 4.0, the 70-300mm VR zoom, a TC-14B and a D7000. The old lens has considerably lower image quality compared with the modern lenses. I think the zoom is very good, and although I'm a fan of non-plastic component construction, I have given that lens some hard use and it seems to stay in specifications well.<br>

<br />The non-AFS 300mm is so heavy it is simply natural to pick up the lens-camera combination by the lens: I doubt you would pick it up by the camera by mistake. I echo what you said about the non-afs with the TC14-b teleconverter: it works quite well, and the tc makes it a 630mm lens on a D7000, albeit with a loss in the maximum aperture. However, at that length, the tripod, head and technique may be more important than the optics for sharp images.</p>

<p>Love it. I am sure the lack of MTF figures for the lenses will virtually paralyze your ability to shoot with them.</p>

<p>For more extreme examples of this phenomenon, do an image search on "Summitar" and "bokeh". Summitars were Leica fast lenses from the 1940s and 50s that had a ferocious "swirly bokeh", and as alluded to above, some people use them in part to exploit that effect.</p>

<p>If it were me, I would save it up and get a used SB-600 or 700. But you can get a Wein Safe-sync for the hotshoe, and then you will be able to use old flashes without worrying about the voltage issue. A pity to miss all of the TTL flash features of the camera, though.</p>

<p>I've been on photo.net for a long time, and have a resulting very high respect for Ellis' expertise, but I would also reiterate my earlier comment in this thread about the scanning option: if you have ever scanned photos on paper with much texture - for example some of the textured papers that were popular in commercial portrait photography in the fifties and early sixties, you will find that at least some scanners record the surface at the expense of the image. I agree with everything being said about file sizes: one big decision is whether you want to exactly reproduce the photos to original size, or make them larger to facilitate any later post-processing steps or larger reproductions. Those decisions will affect the file sizes and storage needs a lot.</p>

<p>If you are going to invest many hours in copying the photographs, I recommend that you investigate using flashes with polarization to reduce reflection "noise" from irregular paper surfaces. This can be a problem with flatbed scanning of old prints with textured surfaces because the scanning light is directional. There is a method that involves scanning from both directions and then layering the images to eliminate the reflections. But you also may have some prints mounted on backings larger than the platens on most flatbeds, and so I would recommend using the copystand and polarization that involves putting aligned polarizing gels in front of the strobes, and a polarizer on the lens. You can use almost any continuous light source as a modeling light through the strobe gels as you focus on an irregular, glossy surface that is not metal, and then you adjust the polarizer on the lens until the reflections are minimized. Once it is all set up, you can shoot many subjects very quickly on an almost assembly line basis. The strobes need to be angled symmetrically, and I am sure you can find precise directions on how to do this somewhere on the web. One thing the polarization cannot handle are old prints that have "silvered" out and actually have shiny metallic silver on their surfaces, because polarization does not work on metal reflections. If you don't want to get into cabling all the the strobes or using radio triggers, you can cable one strobe to the camera, and use inexpensive optical slave triggers on the rest of the strobes if they do not have built in triggers.</p>

<p>I made many hundreds of 35mm slides of book illustrations for teaching purposes with this type of setup, and it would only be easier with a digital slr. I used old Nikon Micro 55mm 3.5 lenses, and they were superb for flatwork. Although not essential with digital, an exposure meter with an incident reading dome that faces up and that can meter flashes is handy for this type of work.</p>

<p>I agree completely about the lens issue. I figure if a camera has a good lens, and it may well be worth a CLA. If the camera's lens is bad, then always send it back. If you really want the camera, try to have the lens evaluated at minimal expense. Something that complicates lens issues with Rollei tlrs is that the taking lens element groups were factory matched, and in general you can't simply swap out a bad front or back group with a replacement from a similar donor camera.</p>

<p>If an opportunity comes around to try a 50-135mm 3.5 AIS zoom, try it and see if you like it. It is a very sharp and constrasty zoom, and is more strongly constructed than the 75-150mm (and admittedly heavier). I carry one with a wide angle prime lens as a walk around kit.</p>

<p>Circumstantially, it appears that the 18-200mm lens is the problem, but I can't see how you can confirm that without sending it in and having it checked. If the context of the failures was reversed, i.e. the studio seemed to be the stressor of the electronics, I would ask about your flash setup. Do you often use a different flash setup on location?</p>

<p>I find it mostly useful in close-up or macro photography in situations when you can control the lighting and can mitigate the screen darkness problem when setting up a shot.</p>

<p>Rick, I agree with Randy: your use of light and composition is really excellent.</p>